Advanced Animal Archetype Feat (for Pathfinder)

Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Ultimate Wilderness has animal companion archetypes, which allow you to change how an animal companion works by giving it new abilities in place of some of the things the animal companion rules normally grant. Of course you can’t swap out the same ability multiple times, which means an animal companion generally can’t have more than one archetype. Also, some classes that get animal companions (such as cavaliers) don’t have all the features needed to swap out for some fun archetypes, which reduced the utility of many of those choices.

But if the animal companions are allowed to just boost up the archetypes they can select, they’ll become too powerful. Even having an animal companion spend a feat to get more archetype powers isn’t balanced, given the relatively low number of feats animal companions can actually benefit from compared to the powers granted by some of the animal companion archetypes.

However, if the character gaining the animal companion spends a feat, that’s an entirely different story. Characters have a huge number of powerful feats available to them, so the cost to overall power level is much higher, which makes up for the potential boost of an animal with an archetype it doesn’t qualify for.

And so, we present the Advanced Animal Archetype feat.

Advanced Animal Archetype

Your animal companions are particularly special.Prerequisite: Class ability that allows you to have an animal companion.|Benefit: Select one animal archetype. If an animal companion you have does not already have that archetype, you may grant it the first benefit of that archetype the companion would have (given it’s HD) if it were able to take the archetype and gain all of its benefits. This does not allow an animal companion to gain benefits at a lower HD total than it would normally receive. The companion does not lose or modify the ability it normally would have lost or modified when gaining this archetype benefit.Special: You may take this feat more than once. Each time, it grants the next archetype benefit of the selected animal companion archetype your companion would have received (given its HD) if it had and could benefit from that archetype.

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About okcstephens

Owen K.C. Stephens
Owen Kirker Clifford Stephens is the Starfinder Design Lead for Paizo Publishing, the Freeport and Pathfinder RPG developer for Green Ronin, a developer for Rite Publishing, and the publisher and lead genius of Rogue Genius Games.
Owen has written game material for numerous other companies, including Wizards of the Coast, Kobold Press, White Wolf, Steve Jackson Games and Upper Deck.
He also consults, freelances, and in the off season, sleeps.